Student team honored at Portland Startup Weekend

May 05, 2014

A team of seven Lewis & Clark students took home top honors at Portland Startup Weekend. The Spoke.Coffee team won best customer validation at the event, with their coffee delivery by bike business that’s facilitated by a simple web application. Spoke.Coffee can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

As the Portland Business Journal explained, Spoke.Coffee pitched a platform that would power online coffee orders that would be delivered by bike from local coffee shops. The group figured out the best price, based on market research, would be $6 per cup of coffee and had already negotiated a discount from one local coffee shop. The team thought the platform would start with coffee delivery but could move into other local stores and change how people buy locally.

Portland Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event that focuses on building a web or mobile application that could form the basis of a business. Anyone is welcome to pitch a start-up idea and receive feedback from other participants. Teams organically form around the top ideas and proceed with business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekend culminates with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders.

“Our developers were on the street pitching the idea to interested customers. We were able to convey our brand to people and get them to try it,” Whitehead said. “We’d like to thank the Center for Entrepreneurship for helping us in the process, and Lewis & Clark for providing us with an education that allowed us to communicate effectively between developers and nontechnical users.”